Oral medication is one of the most popular methods of drug administration into the body because it enables self-medication of the patient. In this category, palatability is an extremely important factor in formulating pharmaceutical forms. Because of the strong unpleasant taste of many medicaments, the value of many drugs is substantially diminished. This is particularly common among children's medications, but is also true for adults. In order to overcome these problems of unpleasant taste and unpalatable taste, many flavorings have been employed with pharmaceuticals. Thus, it is very common to administer many children's drugs as a flavored syrup. Unfortunately, flavoring merely masks the unpleasant mouth taste but affects the palatability only slightly. A number of medications have an especially bitter taste, and even adults reluctantly take them. In many such cases even syrups cannot mask the bitter taste, thus constituting a difficult pharmaceutical problem.
Among the flavorings which have been used for the purpose of masking is chocolate. Examples of patents in which chocolate is used in conjunction with medicaments, are U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,271,142 and 4,327,077 to Puglia et al, U.S. patent No. 3,697,641 to Ahrens, U.S. Pat. No. 199,139 to Clark, British Pat. No. 543,309 to Evans and Australian Pat. No. 7310/32 to Jones et al. Children's vitamins encased in chocolate are also known and on the market, but in these products some of the vitamins are not sufficiently stable. Laxatives in chocolate are also well known. In all of these, however, the unpleasant taste is merely masked and the medicines still adversely affect the flavor of the chocolate and the palatability of the medicine is not substantially improved. Furthermore, stability problems caused by direct contact of the drug with the chocolate can arise.
In order to permit the release of orally administered drugs within selected portions of the alimentary canal, i.e., the stomach or intestine, pills in which the medicament are protected with a desired coating have been developed. A more advanced pharmaceutical form for this purpose is the microencapsulated drug where one tablet or large capsule contains a few hundred tiny (approximately 0.5-0.8 mm) capsules, called microcapsules, containing the drug. The type of coating encapsulating the drug is chosen according to the medication desired and the desired release characteristics. Substained release coatings permit gradual release of medicament over time. Such encapsulated medicament heretofore has not been administrable in chewable form as breakage of any substantial number of microcapsules in the mouth might create an overdose condition.
It has been known to fortify food, including candies, with encapsulated vitamins. This was done to fortify the food rather than provide an improved dosage mode of administration of the vitamin.